Politics is an art that requires combining various areas of action and thought. The macro and the micro, the local and the global, the urgent and the necessary. When I say politics, I mean, more precisely, public management. Politics, unfortunately, has the current day as its absolute priority and the next electoral call as its only horizon. We live—and we want to live—in a democracy, and our capricious right to suffrage conditions everything our managers do. Only dictators can afford the luxury of opening the focus, projecting, foreseeing, stretching time, accelerating and braking, letting things simmer, facing urgent trivialities without neglecting the great challenges that belong to a medium term that never quite materializes.God forbid I call for a dictatorship, but I would like it if, at least in Catalonia, the wisest people would think about the country we will have in twenty years' time, and for their predictions to mark a roadmap for the managers of the present. This is not only sensible, but it is already happening: we have framework agreements for the future of education that are systematically ignored (President Illa has just proposed another one). We have the 2030 Agenda and the EU's plan against climate change, which technofascism tries to discredit, something that would not be necessary, because the egoism of national governments and unforeseen circumstances are already in charge of making them shipwreck.In Catalonia, we have national plans for language, for culture, for mental health, for industry, for the knowledge society, and I don't know how many other subjects. But the chronic instability of governments, and above all the fundamental disagreement between sovereignists and autonomists (because sovereignists, rightly, believe that global challenges cannot be addressed with a Statute of Autonomy), prevents us from applying realistic recipes.

One of the possibly most exciting characteristics of humans is the willingness we show to help when someone is in difficulty, especially, but not only, if they are friends or if we have previously met. It is a prosocial capacity related to empathy that favors the survival of the species and has been shown to also benefit the person who helps, as it receives approval from the environment, fosters reciprocal social relationships, and improves their status within the community. However, it is known that we are not the only species that exhibits this behavior.